


Your Mind Like Music

by Anefi



Series: Anefi's Transformers Works [5]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Cityspeaker Soundave, Other, Telepathy, Titan Cosmos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25324579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anefi/pseuds/Anefi
Summary: Soundwave Week 2020 prompt fillsDay 1, Loyalty: A conversation on Sanctuary before Ravage leaves for the Lost LightDay 6, Abilities: Cosmos likes to talk. Soundwave is a good listener.Day 4, Cassettes: Soundwave and Ravage find something unexpected in a dead spark field outside Kaon.Day 3, Misadventure: Soundwave is not a typical Cityspeaker. The Titan he's found isn't typical, either.
Relationships: Cosmos/Soundwave, Ravage & Soundwave, Soundwave & Cassettes
Series: Anefi's Transformers Works [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1918825
Comments: 18
Kudos: 80
Collections: Soundwave Week 2020





	1. Day 1: Loyalty

Most of the station was still under construction. Vibrations from the riveter teams and their crackling background transmissions filtered to Soundwave down the hallways and through the bulkheads, along with the usual low murmur of the mechs who already called Sanctuary home. The planetside observation lounge was one of the first spaces completed, and it tended to be one of the quietest, especially when it was empty. Soundwave and Ravage sat together, watching the ocher churn of Jupiter’s atmosphere. The view was punctuated by little bursts of laser fire where Laserbeak and Buzzsaw were out shooting asteroids.

Soundwave’s hand on Ravage’s black plating was slightly tighter than was comfortable, but he didn’t shake it off, instead pressing closer to Soundwave’s warmth.

“Soundwave,” Ravage said softly. The big blue hand on his neck had torn mechs to pieces, had repaired him countless time with infinite care. It had supported him, and clung to him, and—always been there. Always. It shook slightly, now, beyond Soundwave’s fraying control.

“That ship: dangerous. Quest: f _oolhardy_. Casualties accumulated since launch: higher than Sol system or Cybertron.”

“Autobot casualties,” Ravage scoffed. “Surely you don’t doubt my ability to avoid their idiocy. If anything, the constant chaos will make this even easier than sneaking aboard the _Ark_.” A particularly bright puff of an explosion bloomed against the dark of space; one of the birds must have hit a bubble of gas.

“Risks: unnecessary,” Soundwave said. “Possible benefit—”

“But, what if—”

“Benefit: negligible,” Soundwave all but snarled.

“I need to know,” Ravage said. He pushed to his feet, shoving against Soundwave’s hand, and set his front paws on Soundwave’s thigh to look him in the face. “He may be your amica, but we _all_ deserve answers. _I_ need to know. Maybe he has his own plan, maybe—”

Soundwave’s twist of emotions escaped as ugly static.

“Or, a third option: he might be waiting for us to make contact. He might _need_ us.” Soundwave looked away. One of the little moons was emerging from the angry furl of the planet, half glittering ice and half shadow.

Ravage knew he’d won.

“It’ll be just like any other mission: infiltrate, reconnoiter, get out if it gets hot. You’ll be busy here, and—I’ll be back before you know it.” He rested his forehead against Soundwave’s humming chassis. “You won’t even have a chance to miss me.”

Soundwave’s heavy hand carefully smoothed down the plating on his shoulder, then came up to scratch behind his audial as he pressed against it, just the way he liked. “Inaccurate,” Soundawave said. “Ravage: already missed.”


	2. Day 6: Abilities

Sanctuary Station was in high enough orbit around Jupiter that the planet’s roaring magnetic field was audible, through the shielding, only as a distant humming static. It was audible to Soundwave, anyway, and to some extent Cosmos. Humans evidently found constant signals with minor random variations relaxing, like the sound of fire, or rain, and after a few cycles of exposure to it, Soundwave could see why. The fuzzing of his perception set a limit beyond which his senses didn’t have to strain. It cut some of the lower-frequency noise from the inner planets, and let him focus more on Sanctuary and the space around it.

He could still hear Cosmos anywhere in the system.

 _Soundwave_.

He didn’t put down his datapad. The low-gravity manufacturing facilities the commune was setting up would be important for long-term maintenance and economic growth, so the meeting was important. Besides, sometimes Cosmos didn’t need him to say anything. He liked to talk.

Soundwave was a good listener.


	3. Day 4: Cassettes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Written a little bit late with an extra prompt from soundwavereporting for soundwave & ravage + small talk!
> 
> It WOULD have been posted for sound wave week if I had managed it--so!

The spark fields outside Kaon had been barren for vorns. Soundwave didn’t know why he was standing at the edge of the last hot spot, looking over the pitted crust, but he couldn’t make himself leave. It was dark, and cold—the _planet_ was dark and cold, dying or dead, and only getting darker and colder. The sentries had waved him past the city limits without question, and now—he was here. For some reason.

After moment, he triggered the sequence to draw back the heaviest armor of his chest. “Ravage: eject,” he said.

The black, bladed shape of his oldest cassette sprung out, unfolding smoothly to land beside him on four silent feet. The sparks of Soundwave’s other four cassettes pulsed sleepily in their decks, and he sent a wave of reassurance through the cohort connection to gentle them back into their recharge cycles.

Ravage scanned the empty field with keen red optics, and, finding nothing, looked up at him with a questioning tilt.

“Objective… undetermined,” Soundwave admitted. 

Ravage accepted that with a teasing flick of an audial and sinuously stretched his limbs and neck, a quick recalibration of cables and servos, finishing with a drag of unsheathed claws against the ground that left deep furrows in the dry dust. “Well,” he said, when that was finished, “it’s a nice enough night for a walk.”

Soundwave felt his bubble of dark humor, and mirrored it. He nodded anyway, and they set off through the battered field, picking their way through ragged juts of metal. The ground was coated with grit and wounded with craters. As soon as the hot spot had ignited, it had been a grim race for the Decepticons to dig out and safeguard as many flickering sparks as they could before the Autobots started launching artillery. Soundwave and his team had spent twelve desperate cycles hacking transmission signals while all the shuttles on roster blasted every satellite in the hemisphere, but there was only so long they could delay the inevitable. There had been a time when neither side would even think to raise a weapon against a protoform, when they would cooperate, even, to guard new fields against Senate culling. More than lives had been lost to the war.

Dust puffed and settled around his feet as Soundwave wandered. Ravage was a formless shadow in slow orbit, but a bright star in his awareness as he explored. After a while, Ravage’s erratic path began to circle around another locus, tighter and tighter. Soundwave adjusts his course to come up beside him when he finally dropped to his haunches at the lip of a crater, frowning down at the glassy shell at the bottom where superheated metal had formed a hard, amorphous scar.

An initial scan returned nothing. “Ravage: detects anomaly?”

Ravage was running his own scans, for the second time. He shook his head, but, “I’m not sure,” he said, instead of denying it.

The smooth walls of the crater and slick layer of dust presented an obstacle to further investigation. After scanning the field again and insuring they were alone, Soundwave stepped over the edge and slid down the sloped edge with his arms flung out for balance, gradually coming to rest near the bottom as the curvature flattened out.

Ravage leaped down after him in a series of graceful bounds. “I don’t know how you think you’re going to get back up,” he said.

“Laser cannon,” Soundwave answered, and Ravage laughed.

From the center of the crater, they started a slow, symmetrical spiral, each step cautious as they hunted.

Soundwave found it first. Silent, dim, and buried a meter down beneath the solid scar of the crater, it was nearly doomed to fade. Instead, Soundwave used the lowest energy level of the laser canon to excavate a careful circle through the rigid glass, then dropped to his knees and began to dig. Ravage hovered across from him, red eyes narrowed. “Surely not,” he said. “It’s been _vorns_.”

Vorns trapped below the surface, suffocating in dead metal. Deep enough to be protected by layers of scorched sentio metallico, and then smothered by them. A late bloomer.

When Soundwave picked the spark up out of the dust, it was the size of the last joint of his finger, shining pink as hydrogen plasma. The nugget of sentio metallico that sustained it fit easily in the middle of his palm. For a long moment, he and Ravage both stared. The little spark seemed at least as surprised as they were, as if, having been released, it wasn’t sure of what to do next.

“It’s so small,” Ravage said. “What could it possibly turn into?”

“Whatever it wants,” Soundwave assured him, all three of them, and gently prodded the lump of wet metallico toward the flickering spark. He cradled it in his hand as the metallico pulled tight around the spark, sending tremors across the surface as it densified. A tiny nub emerged, and then a few more; after some wavering, they settled into two sets of two, mostly symmetrical, and another popped up approximately where a head might be. One of the upper nubs started to stretch into a winglet.

“Another flyer,” Ravage huffed. Soundwave did not comment, but Ravage knew him too well. “Oh, of course you’re happy. You like flight frames.”

“Soundwave: would be honored if the new spark would consider a secondary mode of cassette,” he said. Diplomatically.

“It’s too little to be anything else,” Ravage grumbled. He still watched with as much wonder as Soundwave as the new form took shape. A new life, on a dead world. It had called, and Soundwave had answered; it would never be alone again.


	4. Little Titan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I saw a post with the idea of Cityspeaker Soundwave/Titan Cosmos and I was like :O
> 
> I learned how to make a work skin for this! 
> 
> (warning for experimental typography)

When they found the drifting hulk, it was so pockmarked with asteroid craters that it was barely recognizable as Cybertronian. Some dark green paint had survived the blazing radiation of the nearby dwarf star, incongruous in the field of slowly turning rocks. Stark shadows slithered across the dented hull. Soundwave weaved the shuttle around small planetoids until he found a hole in the outer armor approximately the size of a hangar.

Buzzsaw was the first to poke his head out of the hatch. Without air, they stuck to internal comms. “Creepy,” he said, after a cursory glance around. The edges of the tear that had vented the ship were twisted and charred, and long fingers of blast damage clawed inside. The feeling that there should be some kind of signal, or EM field, anything, made the stark emptiness more unnerving. For equipment as specialized as theirs, inhabited space was almost never completely soundless; automatic routines kept incrementing sensitivity until the static wail of the star itself started to creep into the edges of his perception, and he had to fight a shiver and reset. He and Laserbeak took wing to scout, silent on tiny bursts of their thrusters.

Soundwave stepped out after them. His boots magnetized to the deck with a ringing contact that, to his senses, seemed to reverberate through the hull like a warning bell. A blue helm at knee height peered out after him. “Boss, are you sure about this? It looks like scrap,” Rumble said.

“Rumble and Frenzy: stay with the shuttle,” Soundwave directed. “Be alert for Autobot signals.” He analyzed the continuously updating map being transmitted by Laserbeak and Buzzsaw, and set off down the corridor with a four-legged black shadow at his feet.

He and Ravage left Rumble and Frenzy elbowing each other at the control panel. “I think if the Autobots could pick up a signal from this pile of junk, they woulda been out here vorns ago.”

“You rusty hexnut, they coulda followed _us_.”

Frenzy made a rude noise. “Not _likely_.”

With the ease of long practice, Soundwave tuned them out, to be monitored by unconscious background processes unless there was a sudden change. The ship around him was utterly still.

His measured steps left tracks through rust and rubble until the passage opened up into a room the size of a courtyard. Sensors detected delicate windows set off in alcoves around the space. Broken glass glittered in the air like a fog of trapped stars in the red light of their optics.

Ravage sent him a nearly undetectable local ping. “Can you still hear it?”

In the middle of the room, in the nebula of shattered glass, Soundwave tipped up his head and listened.

“Yes,” he said.

Ravage’s reluctant acknowledgement was tinged with worry.

Slowly, methodically, Soundwave muted his monitored channels, then his active sensors, and then the passive systems on continuous sweep. It was only long practice and complete trust in his guardians that kept him from hesitating. The world around him narrowed further and further, the edges closing in. He was blind long before he finally shut off his optics. The last thing he felt as the awareness of his body fell away was Ravage’s shoulder pressing against his knee.

Wrapped in darkness and silence, Soundwave focused his complete attention on the one sense that remained. His outlier ability. Unique, as far as the Decepticons were aware. Soundwave dispassionately suspected that if there ever had been others, they either offlined themselves or went mad. Soundwave had adapted.

Ravage’s mind was a bright anchor, burning steady. The two sets of twins were familiar touchstones, flickering in easy reach, guarding the small ship they arrived in and gliding through empty halls. Outside the hull, the low shriek of solar wind licked around the drifting debris. Tiny specks of awareness, smaller than glitchmice, huddled in the asteroids nearby, packed into sifting colonies or flinging themselves out in weightless leaps between careening rocks. Flashes of passing subspace messages caught his attention, and were discarded; the _Nemesis_ wasn’t far, a churning hive out in the blackness of space, and the business of war went on even without the chief communications officer on board.

All these small flares were noticed, and analyzed, and set aside. Like a dim glow in a dark room, gradually, something else resolved. The electric buzz of power tugged at the back of his mind, nearly dark in sleep. It was right below him. It was all around him. Barely alive, yet strong enough to call to him from systems away, a constant pull, more insistent than gravity.

The deep hum of a spark the size of a shuttle. The slow, restless tide of a dreaming mind as vast as a sea. Here, now, it was close enough to touch.

Soundwave reached out—and set off a ripple of a thought across the surface of the deep.

 _I am here_.

At first, the great mind didn’t react. The low throb of the spark was slowed almost to stasis, the currents of thought stagnant like thick oil. Soundwave reached out again.

[I am here.]

Something like a shiver in the depths, slowly rising like a bubble through pitch. Denial.

Soundwave would not be denied.

[I am here.]

The immense spark nearly stalled, then shuddered. Like the quakes of a warworld engaging the main battery, a fragment of a thought coalesced, a rising note of rattling bass. Despair broke over him like a fusion core breech.

[Alone (alone) alonealonealone[abandoned]—]

The sudden power of it tore at the walls of his mind, scrabbling at the defenses. Dim light rose to stabbing brightness and furious heat as sluggish processes struggled to initialize for the first time in eons. Soundwave’s battered shields held fast, bolstered by the sharp concern of his cassettes. He faced the wall of twisting despair, and pushed into it with a shining core of truth.

[You are not alone.]

The howling emotion slowly dimmed and withdrew, the churning thoughts dragging together, into a singular, ragged awareness.

[Someone[strange/familiar{query}][uncertain][pleading]?]

Despite having power enough to shake him to component atoms, the tentative contact was almost like the first, questing thoughts of a new cassette, reaching for a bond. He stood firm.

[I am Soundwave. I have heard you. I have found you. I am here.]

Sunk inside the scattered mind as it awoke, Soundwave could feel the heart unspooling, open for Soundwave to see and understand. Plans and schematics tangled together with yearning purpose, cut through with aching loneliness. Barely a third the size of mighty Trypticon, the ship, the city— _he_ —was made for the reach between planets, a sailing beacon in the dark between stars, listening and watching, a warm, solid shell around his crew. Soundwave could already imagine the long process of seeing him repaired and restored, and—after, someday, flying together, a jewel of the Decepticon fleet.

[Cosmos. I am[named][was called/could be{offer}{query}] Cosmos.]

[Little Titan,] Soundwave said, [Do not be afraid.]

**Author's Note:**

> I'm decepticon-propaganda on tumblr, come say hello! :)


End file.
